New toll lanes moved one step closer to impacting commuters in the Capital Region last week when the California Transportation Commission approved an eastbound and westbound lane with fluctuating toll rates for vehicles with one or two occupants on I-80 through Yolo County.
Autumn Bernstein, the executive director of the Yolo Transportation District, told KDRT’s Bill Buchanan in December that actual prices had not yet been determined, but that similar lanes in the Bay Area charge about $1 per mile during peak hours.
The 13-member California Transportation Commission met Thursday and Friday in Orange and, as part of a broader agenda, discussed the planned lane changes, which are part of the Yolo 80 Corridor Improvements Project. Caltrans, the Yolo Transportation District and the Sacramento Area Council of Government are coordinating the I-80 project.
The agencies plan to add 17 miles of new lanes, where tolls will be charged for vehicles with one or two people on them, from Richards Boulevard to Highway 50.
In the memorandum to the California Transportation Commission requesting approval of the toll roads, staff acknowledged that at a public hearing in West Sacramento last month, commissioners “heard members of the public expressing concerns about the potential increase in vehicle miles traveled as a result of the expansion of capacity.”
Susan Handy, a professor at UC Davis who studies transportation, previously told The Sacramento Bee that research has shown conclusively that widening highways will increase traffic in the long run.
“We have a lot of very robust evidence that is very consistent and shows that when highway capacity is expanded, vehicle miles also increase,” Handy said. Adding lanes “doesn’t work because of human behavior. Because if conditions in the road network change, we as individuals will make different choices about our daily travel.”
A 2011 article in the American Economic Review explained that there is a “fundamental law of traffic congestion: people drive more when the road population in their city increases.”
The memorandum to the committee noted that $28 million had been set aside for further “traffic mitigation measures, such as increased transit service.” In response to Buchanan’s questions about induced demand in December, Lucas Frerichs, who serves on the Yolo County Board of Supervisors, and Bernstein both said the tolls would help fund more transit service.
Bernstein argued that the managed toll lane would not have the same effect as adding a standard lane.
Buchanan also said, “No one is going to like the idea of rich people getting a lane that is primarily theirs, except for the occasional bus they have to share it with.”
Bernstein said the highway project would address concerns that wealthy people in particular would use the lane by developing equity programs.
